The story of Cain and Abel is an archetypal story pitting the vegetarian priest, Cain, against the animal sacrificing priest, Abel.  It was originally told in praise of Cain, and in condemnation of Abel. There are apocryphal accounts of Cain that present him as having a shining birth and as representing vegetarianism.  He is an avatar teaching compassion towards all creatures, not their exploitation, as is Abel and orthodox Judaism. In those apocryphal accounts Cain may be seen as a human manifestation of El Chana, (a name of God in the Old Testament). Various forms of Chana mean "favored of God" in ancient Hebrew.  In contrast, Abel's name admittedly means vain, illusory, mourning, lamentation, because the name of Abel is comprised of Ab, a prefix of negation as in the English word Abnormal (Ab-normal).  And El is the name of God. Abel, the cattle killer, was one who negated God. Therefore, among the original vegetarian Jews, the name of Abel itself--Abel is the first clearly defined killer in the Old Testament--represented Evil, and as such is the best contender for being the etymological root of the word Evil.  (See the section on Abel).
 
 

    The ideological battle between the plant eaters and meat eaters is also seen in Sumeria, where some of the hymns to Ani were obviously written by vegetarians honoring all creatures. Zechariah Sitchin in his Lost Realms, a study of Cain's influence in the Western Hemisphere, states that Elisheva in Sumeria meant "My God is Seven," meshes perfectly with the worship of Shiva as Sheba (meaning seven in ancient Hebrew) in original Judaism.  Canaan was itself named after Kannan, a Tamil Hindu name of Krishna.  In Sumeria, as in the other cultures represented below, both vegetarianism and carnivorism were affirmed, a fact that exemplifies the battle between vegetarianism and carnivorism that exists in the religious literature of all ages.
 
 

     We see vegetarianism and carnivorism both indisputably affirmed in Egypt as well.  We see vegetarianism affirmed in sections of The Egyptian Book of the Dead (also known as the Book of the Coming of the Day), where Osiris is visualized as the divine hare Unefer accepting vegetarian offerings.  We see vegetarianism taught in parts of the Book wherein those who eat no flesh and no foul are praised, and in the vignettes of the book where honoring the carnivorous lion deities is juxtaposed with playing dice; in other words, carnivorism is a risky venture for the soul. The vignettes of the Book of the Dead comprise a clear pictorial allegory affirming vegetarianism, in which the soul with a carnelian heart of compassion is saved, and not those who bring animals to the slaughtering block.  However, the Book of the Coming of the Day (the Book of the Dead) also contains numerous scriptures validating offerings of oxen and fowl, thus showing that once again the original scriptures were rewritten.
 
 

   Even in India, in predominantly vegetarian works such as the Laws of Manu and the Institutes of Vishnu, a few scriptures sanctioning animal sacrifices were introduced, no doubt at a later time, by "businessmen," that is, people seeking to profit by selling meat  (as well as by mining or by other industries.)  And it was against the Brahmins sacrificing animals and enforcing a strict caste system that Buddha rebelled, creating a vegetarian and egalitarian monastic order and a new clearly vegetarian offspring of Hinduism.  The monastic system was also egalitarian in that Buddha and the monks all ate the same food, wore the same types of clothing and shared the same type of dwelling.  The spiritual hierarchy of teacher and disciple, however, existed.  In reality, Buddha was not creating anything new; he was simply reestablishing the original purity of the ascetic Brahmins and Jains. The ascetics and monastics were by their nature egalitarian and were vegetarian as well.
 
 

     And in the Yucatan, the Maya followers of Quetzalcoatl, who forbade not only human sacrifices but animal sacrifices as well, were banished by the Aztecs, the majority of whom practiced both. Nonetheless, even among the Aztecs there was the nature goddess Kundalini, providing vegetation and proclaiming that the earth is for all and not to be owned by a few. Kundalini is the name given to the serpent or sakti power, known to practitioners of Yoga, which was originated by Shiva, Lord of Creatures, Protector of Cattle, and teacher of vegetarianism and compassion for all creatures. Shiva was known as Zuiva and Sui va in the Yucatan. As the section on this web site dealing with Kali shows, the Maya and the Hindus shared many deities in common. The Maya received their name from Maya, goddess of creation, who later also came to represent the illusory world of matter, as compared with spirit. Maya is the name of Shiva's mate or Sakti.
 
 

   The Sunnis are the main branch, the orthodoxy of Islam, who assert that the Koran has always taught the validity of animal sacrifices.  The Shiites contend that Ali, the vegetarian nephew of Muhammad, was the true line of Islam, not the Sunnis. Add a V (an easily eliminated vowel in the process of transliteration) to Shiites and we have Shivites.  The sacred stone of the Muslims has long been known to be a Shiva Lingam. The worship of aspects of deity such as Ramman was once the actual worship of Rama as a deity, similar to the veneration given to Rama by Hindus and the original Jews.   And the fact that the Koran itself praises the Sabeans (along with Jews and Christians in the section "The Cow") as the lineage of true worshippers, is in itself a dead giveaway to the fact that the original Muslims were in fact Sabeans. It is known that Muhammad visited various Sabean wilderness communities (See Robert Eisenman's James the Brother of Jesus.) Since the Sabeans existed long before there was any Judaism, the father of Christianity and Islam, the objective student must then understand that it was the vegetarian Sabean creed that was the foundation of original Islam. [ And the fact is that there are even today vegetarian tribes of Muslims usually living in wilderness communities.  It is known that Sadam Hussein has persecuted the Shiites in Iraq. By acknowledging this, I am in no way justifying the abhorrent invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces.]

    However, as occurred in the other religious histories mentioned here, the rich and powerful overthrew the original vegetarian Muslims.  A difference is that this overthrow occurred in just a generation or two. In Jewish history there was a fairly long period of time before the flesh eaters emerged supreme. In Christian history, the flesh eaters emerged supreme and definitely more powerful after Constantine had his religious propaganda safely contained in the New Testament, recognized as "official scripture," in 325 c.e.  It appears, from my understanding of the ancient history of the Yucatan and the Western Hemisphere, that there was from ancient times a mixture of both vegetarianism, since the western part of the world was the dumping place (patala, or hell) for India's undesirables, who practiced cannibalism and carnivorism.
 
 

     There is an abundance of evidence for the original Vegetarian Bible (Old and New Testaments) said to have existed by Wise, Abegg and Cook in their edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, even though, quantitatively, in the orthodox Pentateuch, the number of scriptures sanctioning carnivorism is far greater than the number of scriptures commanding vegetarianism. That is an easy thing for the rewriter of scriptures to accomplish, as we can see by examining the New Testament and Koran as well.  After Constantine, by banishing dissident bishops, had assured that the writings to be included in the New Testament would conform to Roman values, he published the New Testament at the Empire's expense.  This venture by Constantine is one of the best historical examples of how Scripture as Propaganda was promoted by a corrupt Roman regime that under Constantine oppressed hundreds of thousands of people whom they colonized, that routinely murdered dissidents, and that practiced slavery.

    Although I am focusing on vegetarianism, the command to be compassionate extends to all creation, and therefore all expletive forms of industry, that oppress, displace, wound, or kill other creatures, would also be condemned. We shall see in other sections that many Jews such as the Rechabites, Isaiah and most of the Late Prophets and Esdras saw the streets and buildings and monuments of cities for what they were, and still are, the gravestones, or memorials, of other creatures who lived in the earth who were displaced, wounded, oppressed and killed in order to construct the city.

    The Hopi notion that in the beginning all the animals lived peacefully together is shared by Hindus, Tibetans, Jews, and Maya and other cultures. The myth of a paradise that existed before the Fall, as many writers have pointed out, is archetypal, or universal.

 Then God said "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." Genesis 1: 26-28

    Just as the human state of slavery is defined by humans who are subdued and dominated by others, so too animals who are subdued and dominated humans are the slaves of humans. Just as no human wishes to be a slave, but instead wishes to be free, so too is it with other creatures. The original state of harmony among all creatures, created by God according to Jews, Tibetans, Hindus, Hopis, Maya, is violated by those who subdue other creatures or have dominion over them. In fact, this belief, or assertion of a belief, that animals are here for the use of humans, defines the fallen state itself, a fall from the original harmony that existed among all beings.  This belief also defines the orthodoxies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all of which are imperialistic and carnivorous.  In great contrast we have Hinduism and Buddhism, non imperialist cultures which teach compassion for all creatures.

    It really isn't hard to understand that those who subdue the earth or its creatures, or who have dominion over other creatures or other humans, represent the Fallen Ones.  They choose to dominate others rather than live harmoniously with them.  All the attempts of theological systems to justify carnivorism, chauvenism, slavery, bigotry towards homosexuals, or the elitism of the rich over the poor, are all just so much trash contrived by the rich in order to control those under them. And we see such tyrannical and disharmonious views taught in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran. The earliest followers of Jesus shared all things in common like the Essenes, the ascetic Brahmins and Jains, and like them were vegetarians too.  They called themselves Ebionites, from the Hebrew word Ebionim, meaning "the poor," to show that they were unalterably opposed to the rich. They believed, as their lineage taught, that

  Once again, the concept of loving your neighbor as your self was certainly not new, and was taught by all ascetic groups, such as the Jains, the Brahmins, as well as by most Shaivites, and by the more enlightened Vaishnavas and Sakti worshippers as well.  Economic equality is simply a sign of religious maturity; it is a way of defusing all the resentment and violence that are generated by elite systems of rich and poor, and by the institution of slavery. The early Jewish tribal cultures that existed before there was a clamoring for a king in the Biblical history of Judaism were no doubt based on such egalitarian and vegetarian Hindu models.  The fact that spiritual hierarchy existed, that some were regarded as deeper repositories of wisdom, did not negate the material equality of all members of those communities, members who ate the same food, wore the same type of clothes and lived in the same dwellings.  The ways of the Essenes and the Buddhist monastics are well documented, and any reader can study these groups, and even more, can easily visit Hindu and Buddhist ashrams and centers, and even a few modern Essene communities.